I am very impressed with it. I hear complaints about e-readers and finding favorite pages. On the Kindle it has a nice little dog ear book mark.

Its not perfect, I can make at least a dozen complaints I’d like to see addressed, but over all, its a 5 STAR device. The draw backs don’t come close to the benefits.

My biggest complaint, which must be fixed, is the location of the page turn buttons. I can’t pick up, set down, change hands on the device without turning a few pages. I’ve gotten in to the habit of putting it to sleep (think screen saver) before setting it down. When switching hands, I treat it like some unstable element, and delicatly move it from one hand to the other.

As for battery power, as long as the wireless is off, I never notice the power level move, even after several hours of reading. With wireless on, the power meter drops 50% in about two days.

The search feature is a bit too much though. I can’t just search the book I am reading, it searches EVERYTHING on the Kindle, and gives options to search the web, at various sites (Wiki, Google, Amazon…)

Perhaps Kindle 2.0 will address these issues. I the meantime, I will enjoy my girlfriends Kindle.

I have the same problem with p-books, because the pages are loose, I lose my place when I drop it on the floor.

That brings forward another problem with my Cybook. It is not near as easy to ‘flip’ forward to find a specific section as it is with a paper version. They do have the ability to ‘go to’ a specific page number, but it just doesn’t work as well. Neither does going forward one page at a time.

I don’t have any specific suggestions, but there needs to be a better paradigm for searching/skimming through a book to find specific sections.

Sometimes (not frequently) the book looses my place in the text. Finding the previous spot is a major chore — especially when its a book I’m reading for the first time.

Michael

This is completely off-topic, but it’s too brief for me to leave a complete article about.

I just noticed one problem with e-ink devices I’d like to share with your readers. I have over 400 books on my e-ink reader (a Bookeen Cybook) because I often enjoy going back and reading old favorites.

After a days airplane flight to Europe I was quite surprised to see how drained my battery had become. I was down to 30% of power even though I hadn’t been reading that much.

That is when I realized the problem. Remember that the e-ink devices usually quote battery life in page views. When I am reading an old favorite, I often skip through the boring parts and go to the fun parts. Because of the way that e-ink works, paging through screens you never read takes about as much power as if you actually read the book. So when I paged quickly through a couple of books the battery acted as if I had spent all the time necessary to read them.

Michael Harris